Regional newspaper WAZ Media has learned to punch above its weight online by looking at what bigger publishers are doing digitally and seeking out free and open source software and platforms to use, explains the outgoing CEO of its new media Katharina Borchert.

Starting with video the group supplied reporters with Flip cameras to capture original video news and began using a bank of freelancers to edit the footage.

The group has also joined forces with another regional publisher to create The Media Lab – a small company that invests at a really early stage in local online start-ups that add something interesting to the market, explains Borchert.

This has already spawned an online-to-print publishing solution for printed user-generated papers in areas not covered by WAZ’s titles – after a year-and-a-half the group expects this project to be in profit by next year.